Reply #83: Yes, apparently you are missing a lot

[Time for change]

Whether or not Bush SAYS he is bound by the Constitution has nothing to do with it. The fact is that he has violated numerous of our Constitutional rights repeatedly.

For one thing, with his approximately 1000 signing statements he has made clear that he is not bound to follow the laws passed by Congress, and therefore he violates the requirements for the balance of power that is built into our Constitution.

With regard to the Bill of Rights:

the Bush/Cheney administration has repeatedly violated several of our Constitutional rights:

George Bush has denied us our First Amendment rights in numerous ways: He denies the right of protesters to be heard by confining the right of protest to “first amendment zones”. He denies government access to journalists who fail to tow his line. He ties up our airways, using tax dollars, with government propagandists pretending to be real journalists. And he has even claimed the right to imprison journalists who expose administration crimes to the public.

George Bush’s warrantless domestic spying program is a clear example of massive and repeated violations of our Fourth Amendment rights. Though Bush has repeatedly assured Americans that the program’s purpose is to “catch terrorists”, he has offered no evidence to that effect. If the Bush administration’s wiretapping of American citizens had a justifiable basis behind it, there should be no reason it couldn’t request warrants to conduct them. Though Bush claims that that would hamper his “War on Terror”, that claim is patently absurd, since the law allows the requesting of warrants to be retroactive. Furthermore, knowledgeable sources have maintained that, though thousands of warrantless wiretaps per year have been ordered and conducted by the Bush administration, fewer than ten per year are justified by the constitutional standard of “reasonable cause” for suspicion.

In its so-called “War on Terror”, the Bush administration has violated virtually every provision of our Fifth and Sixth Amendments. It is barely an exaggeration to say that our detainees in this so-called war have no rights whatsoever. They are held indefinitely, and only a minute fraction of them have charges brought against them. They are not allowed to confront witnesses against them. They are not given access to counsel. According to our own military, most of them are completely innocent. The whole idea of “innocent until proven guilty” is turned inside out by our administration’s repeated public pronouncements on their guilt.

There is abundant evidence that torture of our detainees is widespread and routine, as documented by Human Rights Watch, Seymour Hersh, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, and our own FBI. Furthermore, the Bush administration has issued memos affirming its right to torture our prisoners, and George Bush himself has appended a “signing statement” to an anti-torture bill passed by Congress.

I have the links to document the above in this post:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1405625

And to top it off, he has demonstrated that he is not bound to comply with Congressional attempts to investigate his many transgressions.

If that's not authoritarian government then what is your definition of authoritarian government?